A few months after he published Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell received a letter from his old French teacher at Eton. Orwell’s teacher found the book “profoundly important”, but he had one important reservation. He doubted whether “the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely”. Instead, he anticipated a softer kind of totalitarianism, “I believe that the world will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons . . . I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.”

Who predicted the future more accurately, Orwell or his former teacher, Aldous Huxley? In 1949 this must have seemed obvious. Huxley was writing to Orwell at the height of the Cold War. Communist rule had just been imposed in Poland in 1947, in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and in Hungary in 1949. Stalin was still at the height of his power. In Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell conveyed to a British audience the horrors of this new Communist totalitarianism. It didn’t just commit violence against its citizens. It tried to control the way people thought. What was new about Stalinist propaganda was not just that it tried to control the present, but also the past. East of the new Iron Curtain, 2 + 2 = 5.

Almost 70 years on, this may seem fusty and antiquarian. What has made this debate suddenly topical is our fascination with Donald Trump. Everywhere, it seems, there is talk about “post-truth”, “alternative facts” and “alternative narratives”. We watch Trump’s press conferences with disbelief. This has made Orwell’s world of “Newspeak” seem relevant again. Social media is buzzing with references to Orwell. A recent cover of Time magazine showed the dark, looming presence of Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, like an image of Winston Smith’s antagonist, O’Brien. The coverline is “The Great Manipulator”. Nineteen Eighty-Four is suddenly near the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. The publicity director of Penguin USA said demand for Orwell’s book had taken off after an interview with Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway on the NBC programme, Meet the Press. When asked why Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, had said something untrue, she replied that he “gave alternative facts”. Within days, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four had risen by 9,500 per cent.

It’s easy to see the connection between Orwell’s dystopia and Trump’s way of being economical with the truth. But is this correct? Doesn’t this miss what Orwell got wrong about the future and why his old French teacher, Aldous Huxley, was the one who got the future right? It turns out that the Orwell/Huxley debate tells us more than we realise about the post-war world and the future.

Orwell was not a futurologist. He didn’t understand what was driving the future in the West, for three reasons: he wasn’t interested in America, he didn’t understand the importance of science and technology, and he was writing about the present, not the future.

Glad to see I was not the only one to pick up on this - my letter to the FT highlighting the need for Orwell to be in read in tandem with Huxley was roundly ignored. Orwell was a secular socialist who believed in mankind finding happiness through democratic materialism. Huxley did not believe materialism makes us happy, hence the bleak vision of Brave New World. Unlike Orwell, Huxley was a scientist (an amateur one but serious nevertheless). More importantly, in his later years he was a mystic who perceived, like all the great pioneers of quantum physics, that we are spiritual beings manifesting human experience. That consciousness is primary to space, time, energy and matter. And that only by realizing this truth do we experience human happiness instead of the fears and frustrations arising from the pursuit of temporary materialist pleasures. Check out The Perennial Philosophy. We need Huxley now.

Mel Profit

March 23rd, 20171:03 PM

Herman is correct that Huxley's "totalitarian lite" is our present and probable future. But his musings about Trump's limited constituency are mistaken. For if, as he speculates, the dystopian future is driven by the substitution of humans by machines, then Trump's base of disposed and disenfranchised will only increase, leaving the two coasts as gated fortresses for an elite 1% fast on its way to becoming a half-percent or quarter percent. How does one employ 300 million people who cannot all be high tech entrepreneurs and engineers, investment bankers and hedge fund managers, nor all bartenders, burger flipper and dog walkers? Until we figure out how, Trumpian "populism" will have gale winds at its back

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